CareyB

I’ve tried many, many different apps, and approaches over the years. On of my peeves is doing things twice, so here are, to my mind, the important decision making factors:

1. cross-device/platform support. Once I was entirely Apple, I settled on Drafts (post processing when necessary), and Apple Notes. If you have multiple OS’s involved, the decision is harder (Evernote). The logic is that I wanted some contextually sensitive templates for field notes, and Drafts does that with its version of ‘macros’. Having the MacOS version makes writing reports from my notes is dead easy.

If you’re less concerned with re-typing, and/or transcribing, do what you want.

Energy generation, and storage.

What verytrivial said!!!!

I’ve been in similar situations, but never without an immediately obvious solution.

That system WILL FAIL. Even as we speak the time-to-failure is shrinking.

Even if one of the solutions described below actually works, you won’t get 100% recovery.

I recall a story years ago - from MIT, if memory serves - where they rebooted a system because they had many generations of Sybase backups. When they tried, it didn’t work. Nobody had actually tested recovering from a backup.

Grit your teeth; cover your ass; and get on with it. The clock IS ticking.

I’ve been in IT since the early nineties, and I see this as symptomatic of a more basic issue; putting non-IT managers in charge of IT. This used to be chronic. I’d be in board meetings trying to explain to the entire company brain trust the difference between a hit, and a page view. When they realized - after about nine months - that there were over 30 hits per page view, their entire business model went out the window. There are other fun, and unaware stories out of that job, but I’ll leave it there.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll notice it weighs 0.50 kg, or approximately ONE POUND. Just NO!

Lots and lots of ‘finger errors’, as they call them in Formula 1.

Wow! WordPerfect reimagined.

Great analogy

This is what happens when pretentious literati feverishly search for something novel to expound on. There is no magic spell with which to entrance your readers. Pick a method, practice, and develop your own style. If you’re really, really lucky, your style will coincide with the shopping lists of our various editors, and publishers, and you might make a living. Write on!

Not really. Wix and GoDaddy clobbered it, and now there are others. At one point I had over 30 sites requiring regular maintenance, and upgrades. Plus a few I developed, installed on other servers, and did not maintain. Now I’m down to about four. These days there’s almost always someone in a small business’ office with the requisite skills to do basic upgrades, and small changes. I get called when things go wrong, or there’s a major overhaul in the offing. Many small businesses do quite well with a Facebook page, or some other self development tool. The sites look amateurish, and derivative, but they get the job done. All you want is the ‘Who, what, where, when, and why’, and standards are so low there’s no functional penalty for having a lame Web presence. I find more clients hiring full time ‘social media’ specialists rather than me. I have pondered becoming a ‘social media expert’, but the fact that I have worked building some of the early experiments taints me against the concept.

Almost all Web sites are similar these days, and there’s a value to designing the UI/UX in a way users expect. I suggest that, for startups, and small businesses, there’s virtually no need for anything other than a basic Web presence. With the rise of social media, the appropriate account(s) will solve that problem for most.

I worked through the wild west of this industry, and it was semi-fun, but I think we’ve moved on, things have settled down, or are settling down, and there’s a minimum sufficient requirement for a Web presence that’s pretty freakin’ minimal.

Two things:

1. We read much faster than we speak, so watching a video is massively less time-effective. If the junior is doing this on company time, they’re costing money.

2. There was an article somewhere about a dev exhibiting these ‘symptoms’. Turns out they were barely competent. Their entire method was to copy code they found on the Internet, and paste it in. They were entirely incapable of writing code from scratch. The article went on to elaborate that, after extensive (expensive) coaching from the senior dev who authored the article, the person turned out to be a pretty good developer. They just started their career trying to advance by gaming the system.

Simplicity is very hard.

I’ve been at this since the ninteies. At the peak I was getting $2500 for a ten page Drupal site I could do over the weekend. These days you can get a ‘custom’ programmed site from a guy reselling the services of an Asian programming group for $100, so how are you supposed to compete? I have made some money ‘fixing’ those sites, but for the most part my business is dead agaist things like Wix (Ugh), or Goddady Site Builder. I still make money extending those sites when the business wants to do more with their Web presence than the basics, but essntially there doesn’t seem to be any way to convince the more frugal clients to spend ten times what the site builder guys charge. I have had some success selling functionality. I offer a basic, ten page Drupal site, with additional charges for added functionality, but you’ll never be able to charge more for adding pages. I will even advise a prospect to go with those services to start with, just so I can be a good guy, and have them remember me when they need more.

Someone once gave me the advice to never offer a discount. You can do things for free, but never discount anything. If you do, you’ll end up discounting everything.